I don’t really have much stuff to write so I’ll just be sharing this quite nice article posted at TeamLiquid.net’s board. Here’s an article by Ursad0n and the original forum post should be here.
The Battlecry of the Damned: Imbalance
Imbalance - The reason 99% of players lost their games (or so they say...)
Introduction:
Now I’ve heard a tremendous amount of talk about imbalance since I expanded the SC2 section on the left and started playing again. It seems to be the talk of the town since the early days of beta, with the large influx of new posters running around not understanding the rules and regulations of the Glorious site that is Teamliquid.net. This influx of people who have not played the predecessor to SC2 – Starcraft: Brood War (the greatest game of all time to this day) – has upset the once stable, well balanced ecosystem that Teamliquid once was. The reason this is true is that the Brood War players had a wealth of RTS experience, and many of us played the game for large portions of our lives, playing through the bugs and so-called “Imbalances” and adapting builds to overcome them. For those of you who have not played BW or were not around early enough to experience all of the horrendous little gems that BW had to offer, I’d like you to watch this video:
A Journey to the Past:
Now that you’ve seen that, you may be asking: What the fuck!? IMBALANCE
At the time, so were we…momentarily. Now let me just say that I didn’t belong to TL until April of this year, and many of you will discredit me for that, and my fairly low post count, but I feel that is wrong. (Much like racism, as they are similar) Now if you’ll look around you’ll see a surprisingly large number of new posters, starting around when SC2 came out, but don’t discredit them based on the low post count/join date. Merit should be based on the quality of the post, take Baller for example, that guy is a fucking badass, but has only a little over 500 posts. Then look at someone like CharlieMurphy who had over 20k posts, all garbage.
Back to what I was saying, of everyone that I played with at the time not one of them said, that’s imbalanced bullshit / impossible to deal with / this game is broken, and lets be honest, that shit was fucking BROKEN.Starcraft Brood War: Necessary Changes – Let’s use patch 1.04 for example. It shows the massive amount of problems with the game.
Now, that seems like quite a bit of problems to me. Have you ever seen a patch with notes that long in SC2? No, because it’s not that bad. But I don’t remember large Imbalance complaints. I remember things like This which was mostly everyone saying that a certain race was the best/their favorite, not which unit was completely broken. And from the same site:
Apr 24, 02 at 1:56“for the best tactic its the prottos since if no rush 10 min the hurry and rush by making alot of goons and i have a very fast maker of units::::::::make 1(one)units at a time dont fill up the 5 space just make alot of gateways and make 1 of each and hurry until they *bleep* out just wait and make more!!!!”
Look at that, in a thread created in 2002, by some kid that played NR10, using only that build for 3 years was talking about how it wasn’t that he was abusing imbalance, but rather that he was optimizing his build. Not saying “make mass goons they’re IMBA!” but rather ” if you make 1 unit at a time you get more faster.”
Think about the two scenarios:
1- Someone makes mass dragoons and wins in BW – It’s because he made his build efficient.
2 -Someone makes mass marauders and wins in SC2 – It’s because marauders are OPWhy is that?
Freeze Frame: 3rd Person Look at Ourselves
Let’s go into our replay folder, and open up the file named “Beta – The Journey” and analyze where we are now and how we got here, so we can decide what went wrong and how to fix it.
What went wrong?:
April 4, 2010 look what we have here an Imbalance thread, seem familiar? There are thousands of these, and the problem with it is: why say “this is imbalanced” and not “we need to formulate a response to X” in the first you are removing the player from the equation and saying the game is broken, not any inadequacy, and only because you lost/have difficulties with something. In the second, you recognize it as a strong build and wish to formulate a strong build to fight it with.What’s the difference?
By claiming imbalance you have already lost every game in which you come in contact that strategy by defeating yourself mentally, therefore you no longer are progressing in practice against it, and you aren’t making solid builds against it because you assume they’ll lose anyway. The only solution to imbalance is for Blizzard to A) Recognize something as imbalanced B) Come up with a solution C) testing the solution D) apply the Blizzard delay E) Have blizzard release a patch that is completely irrelevant to the problem and solves nothing F) the rest of the shit between then and a useful patch. The idea of Imbalance is like the plague, one person makes the post, it gets read (consciously or unconsciously) and the idea is out there, so if someone loses to that strategy they say it’s imbalanced too.My trying to fix the problem you can include everyone in the community in an effort to fix a build that took someone a long time to come up with, and you get the give and take of making builds and defeating them. End result being Starcraft BW. The process for this is A) find the problem B) Try to fix it C) win games with it. Which takes much less time and is good for the game.This spreads in a different format, because it is less interesting at first glance so less people see it. One person makes the post -> everyone else has already decided it was imba -> they get flamed -> everyone waits for a patch. How the HELL do you get better like that? It’s ruining the community bit by bit.
So at the moment every single strong build is Imbalanced and no innovative strategies are created. Making the game boring and leading to everyone saying BW was better. OF COURSE YOU SAY IT’S BETTER – not because BW was a better game, but because everyone is making SC2 a bad game. It’s absolutely ridiculous, and everyone complaining about MBS, Smartcasting, and other differences are adding to the problem. If you want to play BW, go play Brood War. Blizzard isn’t going to listen to some people complaining that SC2 isn’t the same as BW, and they don’t fucking care, why would they make SC2 like BW. They already made BW they don’t need to make it again. So they’re just making themselves look bad and blaming those things for their loses.
Crystal Ball: Starcraft 3 (2049)
If we continue down the path we are on Starcraft will probably die out because the absurd amount of shitty posts flooding TL will reach a point where TL is no longer enjoyable to be on, and if people want to get called a fag by 12 year olds who call everyone better than them a nolife and worse than them a noob then they’ll go play Halo or Call of Duty. Does everyone want that? Nothing good can come from the current low quality and high quantity of SC2 posts (mostly relating to imbalance).
The Solution: Making the Game What It Should Be:
Stop crying about imbalance
Play the game to improve
Stop making stupid useless posts
If u think BW is better go play it
Treat the game as if perfectly balanced, play to beat the Strong builds (not IMBA Strong)
Don’t talk about imbalance
Don’t respond to someone talking about imbalance
Go play the game and have Fun!!!!Hopefully this will inspire at least one person to drop the Imbalance fad and play the game how it should be played. Everyone needs to remember that we fought hard to get this far and the imba cries and overall poor attitudes and the like are destroying it all. Day9 hasn’t always been this huge superpower, in BW he was just a guy who wanted to talk about Starcraft, and he talked about it to ~500 of us live. and MLG has negotiated with Blizzard to get SC2 onto it’s circuit and is investing in making it better each event. GSL has an $87k prize pool, but someday that money will have been wasted if everyone ruins the game. ICCup spent TONS of time on making BW as good as possible, and they said it’s in Blizzard’s hands, they said they don’t intend to do the same for SC2 but rather want to work with Blizzard.
Lets go back to what Starcraft once was, a fun way to pass the time, and do something we love. And have an entire expanding community of people to interact with while we play. The Starcraft scene should have gotten better with the large foreigner proscene, but it’s worse. Anyway that’s it. Hope you enjoyed the read.
EDIT: Don’t blame the map for a loss either, BW had maps, as SC2 has maps, that favor each race. Be it on purpose or accident, it is too early in the game to be able to consistently make maps that are well balanced because the scene is changing so fast, so maps are currently made for aesthetics and to prevent HUGE imbalances/abuses, but it’s not getting better until the game settles a tad. So that is also not going to help you get better either, if you don’t like a map take it out of your map preferences, and if you get it anyway, try to overcome the “so-called imbalance” with either a new build or just some simple tactics. Make the map balanced by the way you play, don’t let the map’s balance determine your play.
Of course, all credits goes to the original poster, Ursad0n of TL.net, I’m just reposting here. I’ve never seen such as good argument with regards to all those still crying out OP and imba. And yeah, being a game developer myself, it is really hard to ship a perfect game on it’s first time. In a game development life cycle, it’s really hard to identify and iron out all the bugs and design issues with very limited time and very limited resources. It might not be perfect right now, but hey, there are still two more expansions to come and there are still a lot more patches to come. (Oh shit! This feels more like WoW, oh no!!!!!!!!!!)
